Why an internal wiki is important for a growing development team (or an entire company)

Posted by mkhairul - May 22, 2008 at 10:05:10 pm - 1 Comment

Categories: blog, rants

One of the things that I wished companies have is a Getting Started page in a wiki. As a reference and as a guide. So you don’t have to bother someone else if you forget about something (unless you’re just trying to start a conversation, which would lead to a RTFW).

If you’re not living in a rock for the past few years. Almost every software have a getting started page. Helps their users to get up and running. It is also essential in helping someone who just enters an alien (or slightly different) environment to get up to speed on the ways things are done.

For your information, wiki is also being used by companies such as Motorola (MOT), Yahoo! (YHOO), Amazon (AMZN), Google (GOOG), IBM, eBay, and Nokia (NOK). Isn’t that reason enough to deploy a wiki in the company?

Continue reading Why an internal wiki is important for a growing development team (or an entire company)…

Mouse over Info on fields

Posted by mkhairul - May 22, 2008 at 12:05:10 am - No Comments

Categories: Development, blog

I’m creating a simple web app similar to del.icio.us but focuses more on a specific task. One of the features that I put in is the mouse over on a field will reveal an info (not tooltip). Not as nice as Wufoo though.

This stuff is used with jQuery 1.2.3 and in the screenshot of the mouse over info I used Blueprint CSS Framework.

Here is a screenshot of the web application.

Continue reading Mouse over Info on fields…

Cannot delete folder: Access is denied

Posted by mkhairul - May 20, 2008 at 07:05:40 am - 4 Comments

Categories: Tips, Troubleshoot

Ever stumble upon this message while trying to delete a file or a folder?

Cannot delete folder: Access is denied

Make sure the disk is not full or write-protected and that the file is not currently in use

Most probably you have, and most probably doesn’t know how to handle this.

Continue reading Cannot delete folder: Access is denied…

Filing in a big company

Posted by mkhairul - May 17, 2008 at 06:05:48 pm - 1 Comment

Categories: blog

2 weeks ago, I got sick from food poisoning which results in stomach pain, restlessness and diarrhea. So anyway after 2 days of leave I got back to work and did some paperwork for the leaves and claims.

All files related to administration and processes were put on a mapped network drive. So I opened it up and there this long list of folders with 3 or 2 letter acronyms. HRM, ITC, OP, and lots of other stuffs. There’s some that I can figure out but most of it, I have no clue. I don’t know about others but I think we (programmers) have enough acronyms or abbreviations to remember already. The only choice is to go around asking, in hope that someone have been working long enough to get around to know all of this administrative acronyms. Or maybe I can go through all the folders! Haha!

I don’t know how other big companies manage their new employees. But I think there should be a Getting Started knowledge base or something.

phpMyFAQ, arabic display problem

Posted by mkhairul - May 14, 2008 at 09:05:49 pm - No Comments

Categories: Development, Tips, blog

I’ve been using phpMyFAQ for the past few days. The drawback is the unicode support (which is probably a problem for most PHP application) but everything else is ok and well designed and implemented. I have no trouble going through the code, tinkering with the inner workings and stuffs unlike KOHA (documentation very poor) which is a horror to go through. Everytime I see KOHA I would like to cry. Or maybe the version we’re currently using is horrible.

Ok, one of the other drawback is the encoding. I know there’s lots of languages that they try to support and I have come to learn very well that it is not an easy task. Recently I worked my way around trying to implement English/Arabic content for the system. Seperate CSS for each of the language (English is left to right, Arabic is right to left), to make the layout consistent.

The rest of the site displays perfectly in arabic (from the language file), but when I insert some content, it displays as html entities representation of the characters instead of the characters itself. I modified (real-time) the content a little bit by using firebug by adding a space (and removing it again), automagically it displays the arabic characters. After a refresh it is back to the entities.

Since this is the first time I’m handling unicode characters I’m not very familiar with the functions related to it. I noticed that everything that looks like it requires encoding it is passed to PMF_htmlentities, which runs it through htmlspecialchars. There’s some data inside that gets run through the function twice which ultimately results in & instead of & needed to display the html entity. Data that doesn’t display correctly I pass it through html_entity_decode which makes it display all the characters correctly.

I still don’t get it why it doesn’t display the characters correctly, the html entities printed are all correct. It just doesn’t display it correctly unless I use html_entity_decode. *shrugs*
I’d have to investigate this further in order to contribute.

References for Handling UTF-8 in PHP.

Handling UTF-8 with PHP

Character Sets / Character Encoding Issues

Common Problem Areas with UTF-8

How to develop multilingual, Unicode applications with PHP

Can’t wait for PHP 6, more unicode support! Yeay!

Growth of Unicode on the Web

Posted by mkhairul - May 6, 2008 at 09:05:45 am - No Comments

Categories: blog

 One Encoding To Rule Them All!

Wow, Its amazing to see its growth. But it should be expected. The rest of the world is slowly hooking up to the internet. And it must support them. "Resistance is futile, we will be assimilated!" I too am working on applications that must handle unicode. The main language here is arabic and english. Google: Unicode conquers ASCII on the Web

Feeling the effects of sleep deprivation

Posted by mkhairul - May 2, 2008 at 08:05:27 am - No Comments

Categories: blog

After reading Sleep deprivation is not a badge of honour (and all of it comments), I started to ponder about myself in the old days. There was this mini waterfall thing in the school. After one look, I remember exactly the image of what I saw of the waterfall. When class is in session, I would draw and draw and draw until the class is over. Sometimes the teacher took notice but I really didn’t care. Even stationaries on my desk is subjected to my drawing, the angle, the shadows. At the end of the day, my sketch book is filled with drawings from Dragonball, comics and scenery.

Good times.

And then I started working. With nothing, no PC at home made me stay all night at the office to learn new stuffs. Amazed with problems and trying to  meet with employers expectations made me stay all night, debugging, coding the problems. Eager to achieve plus with freshman’s optimism and enthusiasm, I volunteered and suggests solutions where non of my colleague wants to be part of. Naive and foolishness which costs me my sleep. Sometimes the inevitable problems (critical errors and such) requires immediate attention. But all is not lost. There is still time, by realizing this, I believe the ability to remember can be re-trained. Sleep as my body tells and try to wake up with full of ideas.

"I wake up in the morning with ideas that please me, and some of those ideas actually please me also later in the day when I’ve entered them into my computer."
  – Interview with Donald Knuth

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